Official site of author, programmer, and musician Neal Alan Spurlock

A lot of people seem to be having problems using the new Jason and Horror Pack DLC for Mortal Kombat X. I ran across the fix here, but their site seems to be down, so I decided I would help out the community.

Make sure that you already purchased the MKX Kombat Pack in the Playstation Store and that it is downloaded. If you need to make sure, do a search for “Kombat Pack” and you should be able to select and manually download the Jason, Horror Pack, and Samurai Pack DLC from there. You can also confirm they are correctly installed within the game, by going to the in-game store and tabbing around (using R1 and L1) until you see the appropriate DLC, selecting it, and hitting X. It should show that it is downloaded and installed.

Make sure the Netflix app is also installed. It should be listed under “TV & Video”.

Start Mortal Kombat X and start a single-player fight with any character.

While the fight is loading, hit the PS button, and then start Neflix. It will tell you this will quit out of MKX and ask for confirmation. Hit okay.

Let Neflix load for a few seconds, then hit the PS button again and go back into Mortal Kombat X. It should not have stopped playing yet.

Hit “options”, back out of the single-player fight to the character-select screen, and Jason should be right there, all the way at the left.

Select him and play. He’s AWESOME!

Again, all props to thisgengaming.com for making this knowledge available…good luck with your database issues.

Enjoy the game! My PSN tag is thePuck77…hit me up and we can play some matches.

One question often asked when issues of gay marriage and transexuality come up is “What will I tell my kids when they see ___________?” The story in the picture shown above is a response to that, sometimes sincere, concern. It also reflects my own experience over a lifetime of being bisexual and polyamorous; kids are surprised and interested in novelties, but beyond that, they integrate the new knowledge with the rest of their worldview just fine.

Kids never seem to be the ones with the expectations regarding this. They seem to have very few or no moral intuitions on the issues of gender, romance, and sexuality at all. Their parents, when this is a legitimate concern, should be reassured; your child will simply accept and integrate the truth: “some people are homosexual/transexual/whatever”. But what else can we learn from this lack of moral intuitions on this issue?

Especially compared with their other moral intuitions, such as “no fair” and “don’t hit me” and “be nice to me” taken together with their abilities to empathize (the studies on this have been fascinating…babies care about the shape trying to climb the hill and get upset at the other shape trying to stop it) developing as a function of brain development, it seems unlikely and remains to be shown that there are any prescriptive moral intuitions about romantic and sexual relationships. In the absence of active teaching about such norms, they simply aren’t established nor seen as necessarily requiring norms in the same way as other behaviors. Not only are there no apparent moral intuitions, it seems that we don’t really have moral intuitions about the category as a whole.

This could be due to romance being a human creation, but pair bonding is present in many other species and there are too many brain structures that seem to be devoted to it for me to be convinced that romantic relationships are invented by humanity.

However, all available data does suggest that there is an authoritarian impulse to control other people, and that one of the best methods–used in everything from religious monasteries and the Manson cult to most militaries and the Patty Hearst kidnappers–is forcing sexual behaviors, such as celibacy or promiscuity, and generally taking sexual/romantic agency away from the people you want to control.

Taken in this context, it seems more likely that such sexual and romantic norms have historically arisen due, not to any ethical principles or moral intuitions, but due to authoritarians wishing to control populations.

So ask yourself…are you the authoritarian benefiting from the power over others granted through such social control over sexual behaviors? Most likely the answer to this is “no”. You are most likely part of the population that the authoritarians want to control using this technique. Since this is the case, why should you help reinforce or reify ANY PART of these norms? Why help those who want to control and manipulate you? If you aren’t merely an opportunist about these things and if you value freedom, then you should oppose any such attempts to control and manipulate anyone, and since it is clear that these sexual/romantic norms are about control, you should oppose them on those grounds.

So don’t worry about your kids; their moral development isn’t going to be stunted by seeing people demonstrate their romantic connections in public. They will simply update their worldview to include a new set of facts.

What you might want to worry about, however, is how many beliefs like this–alleged issues of morality and ethics–will turn out, upon inspection, to be the manipulations of authoritarians trying to use certain tendencies of humanity to control people. I know I have spent most of my adult life dismantling the mass of ideas handed to me by my culture and family, and thanks to the prevalence of these false, controlling ideas in our era, I will never really be able to stop actively working to keep them from governing my mind. This is one of the reasons I have dedicated myself so intensely to philosophy, rationality, logic, and–above all–truth; without such a commitment, false and destructive beliefs would have destroyed me, on just about every level you can imagine. I truly believe that a similar commitment by the majority of the population is necessary before any real reform or politically just world exist. We must care more about truth and freedom–all truth and everyone’s freedom–than power over others.

How many false or destructive beliefs do you have that were put there by other people trying to control and exploit you? How many false or destructive beliefs ideas are you basing your life on that only benefit political, religious, economic, and social “leaders” trying to maintain their control? How many false or destructive beliefs beliefs have you passed on to others in an attempt to control them? Be honest with yourself, if not me…how many things that you know the evidence or reasoning behind are a little–ahem–shaky–have you passed on, retweeted, or taught to others? How much evidence have you ignored because it didn’t fit your agendas? How much evidence have you been convinced to ignore because it fit the agendas of others for you to do so?

How can we know if our beliefs are of this suspicious type? One way is to use our emotions as a guide. Simple matters of fact (i.e. 3 squared is 9) have no emotions attached and are generally taken for granted and uncontested. While this isn’t a sure test, it’s a good place to start: if a belief has a lot of emotion attached and is contested in the public sphere, it is probably a good idea to be skeptical about it and start looking for evidence and arguments before forming a belief. If the issue is one that is immune to such inquiries, such as self-report (i.e. “I feel a pain in my toe”), is by its nature anecdotal (i.e. “I ate lunch with an alien yesterday”), or metaphysical (i.e. “Realism about numbers is true”), then you are left with reason alone as your guide, so you need to be extra careful about accepting false premises and should learn about the various cognitive and logical fallacies that may mislead you.

And finally, if all of these things still leave you undecided, ask yourself this simple question: “Who benefits from me believing this claim?”. Try to look at the question in as many contexts as possible and in both the large and the small, the political and the personal. If the person or group that benefits the most from you believing a questionable claim is the same person or group who told you about the questionable claim in the first place, then you should be very suspicious of that claim.

Such honesty can be a burden. Attempting to ferret out all the false, manipulative, and often dangerous beliefs in ourselves and the messages we receive from the world around us can become overwhelming. But I believe it is absolutely necessary. Not only must we place guards between our senses and our minds, testing every single idea before accepting it, we must resolutely rip out the traitorous ideas we find already established. If we want a free world where each and every one of can both be moral and demand morality in return, then we cannot allow such beliefs in ourselves, nor can we indulge the temptation to instill those beliefs in others, no matter how good the “cause” may seem. There are “bad tactics”, no matter how good the “target”; our allegiance to each other and ourselves must begin with an allegiance to truth.

I know, I know, those of you with teenage daughters out there might be pained, but just explain the real consequences of irresponsible sex and leave out the lies (no one needs a Pillow Pants in their lives). Statistics show that the best outcomes arise from actual education about sex, relationships, sexually transmitted diseases, birth control, and pregnancy. Some very limited discomfort now can save a lifetime of suffering later for everyone involved.

In this article, Dr. Parsons defends the public value–that is the value to the taxpayer–of teaching philosophy. He appears to believe that the primary reason people ignore or question the value of philosophy is its obscurity of chosen topics and methodology. I will attempt an alternative explanation of the criticisms and general disregard for philosophy as a field.

I don’t agree that it is obscurity that makes philosophy unpopular (have you ever played Pokemon? Learned the details of the DC Comics universe? Now THAT’S obscure). It’s not the jargon, either; every profession and subculture at this point uses some jargon and it has become normal to include little dictionaries in one’s FAQs. Hyperlinking and hypertext, in general, makes such terms of art more easily accessible than ever before, and such use of language does not create a similar barrier to similarly jargon-filled fields like computer science and law. No one questions/ignores the usefulness of combinatorics or contract law because it requires specialized language to engage in a specialized task, or regularly implies that stoned teenagers are the equivalent to people with multiple specialized degrees in the field…that is uniquely a charge leveled against philosophy.

Instead, I would argue that it is precisely what philosophy and reason qua reason wants to do, and always has, that makes it unpopular with everyone from the teen rationalizing why she “deserves” to borrow the car to those attempting to start religious wars: to understand the truth. It is the same reason science has been attacked since its inception. Philosophy is unpopular and anti-intellectualism to the point of misology is the norm throughout much of history for the simple reason that it serves the perceived interests of many, many people to believe–and persuade others to believe–untrue things.

I would further argue that this desire for limited applications of reason is present within most of us to some degree. Philosophy tends not to allow the many accommodations and compromises any given society must make with its collective conscience. Ethics, properly argued, tends to attempt to justify various obligations, and much of human behavior is attempting to rebuke and ignore such obligations…and their consequences for the moral status of the average participant. When someone, looking at my iPhone, informs me of the problematic ethics of the practices that led to its manufacture and low price, they are implicitly making a normative ethical claim along the lines of

“In order to be a good person, you are obligated not to participate in evil acts willingly and willfully. Since a purchase of an iPhone is a willful act, and I have made you aware of the evils committed in its manufacture and pricing, you are thus obligated to refuse to further participate in those evils.”

These sorts of claims make us uncomfortable for various reasons, and there are all sorts of ways to pick at them, but the argument is there and people make it. Similar arguments are made involving eating meat, ethical treatment of test animals and pets, etc. We don’t want to really give up our lives, but it’s also clear that a consistent ethical examination argues that much of our lives come about through blameworthy and unnecessary actions on the parts of various people very carefully not considering the moral salience of their actions. Since we neither wish to feel like we are bad people nor wish to give up our lives, we–often tacitly–reject the easily ignored and immaterial concept that forces us to do one or the other: reason.

Shall we ask ourselves the moral status of turning ones ethical agency over to the proxy agent of the “superior officer” or “chain of command” when one cannot ascertain the ethical status of that proxy or when the ethical status of that proxy is known to be untrustworthy (at best) or blameworthy (at worst)? It is very important to almost all current cultures that enlistment in military and civil service is considered morally praiseworthy…and that importance, both militarily and as an issue of morale and narrative consistency, eclipses many people’s general desire to think clearly or believe true things.

I’m not claiming we are willing to abandon reason and ethics entirely…the teen still argues in terms of “fair” and “desert”, for example. But we, like the toddler who cries “no fair” whenever he loses at a game, regardless of how he lost, want reason and ethics to serve us while being off-limits for others. The boss wants his employee to believe in loyalty when offered a better job, and will attempt to rebuke him for considering the position, while demanding the right for himself to fire and hire as the pragmatic needs of profit-seeking dictate. The government wants its populace to believe in the legitimacy of contracts and laws, while considering those same contracts and laws as mutable tools to accomplish whatever goals are necessary at the moment. All states want their subjects to believe in the legitimacy of political authority, while themselves being able to ignore the contractual nature of the theory behind that authority.

This suggests a sort of non-religious interpretation of Nietzsche’s argument from Genealogy of Ethics. As a tool of power, reason can be like Christianity/ressentiment: it convinces those that would fight the strong to weaken themselves through being tricked into agreeing to its asymmetric application.

The only solution, of course, is to commit ourselves even further to our enterprise. The worth of philosophy, reason, and the “life of the mind” are difficult to show in themselves…but their worth are shown in the manifest wonders that thought–guided by reason–have produced in the world. The device I am typing this upon came about as the result of engineers and physicists, surely…but the principles those physicists and engineers used came from logic and the philosophical foundations of mathematics just as surely.

So let us hear three cheers for the thinkers, the philosophers, and especially the “Centaurs”, those philosopher-mathematicians, who gave birth to our world. Hopefully the next “new world” will be as wonderfully informed.

One of the most fucked up things I’ve heard in a while: Arya Ghavamian (not linking to content thieves, use Google)–ostensibly a filmmaker, although one must wonder what HE has actually created, given everything that has come out–has plagiarized the film “Heart String Marionette“, one of M dot Strange‘s bizarre and amazing creations. He made a few edits, ripped out and replaced dialogue and audio, and then claimed it as his own, going so far as to submit it to film festivals such as local event Cinequest…which is located in M dot’s own stomping grounds.

Cinequest will instead be showing “Heart String Marionette” (if I could get over there from Santa Rosa easily I would go just to see it on the big screen), but that doesn’t change the fact that this thief has attempted to opportunistically steal credit for the work of one of the most interesting and creative minds I have run into.

To M dot: I’m sorry this has happened to you, man. Keep the faith, been enjoying watching your gamedev vids.

To Arya Ghavamian: I hope that you learn from this, but I also hope that this never dies down and your reputation is eternally stained, marking you as a plagiarist and thief of creative work.

You can find out more by reading M dot Strange’s post on his studio’s main blog. You can learn more about M dot and his work on his About page, and you can watch Heart String Marionette in it’s entirety here. Please consider supporting his work, and please consider supporting the work of independent artists like him (and myself)…drama like this is only skimming the surface of the bullshit we have to put up with just to do our thing.

Humans will kill people for anything, once they can come up with a justification for adopting a dehumanizing out-group dynamic about it. Dr. Seuss was right…it’s Butter-Battles and Sneetches (with star-bellies and without) all the way down.

And that dehumanizing trick is almost always some variation of the “injustice-hack”, a social and psychological manipulation that invites both designated victim and interested onlookers to believe that an injustice is being committed, thus hijacking our empathy and getting us to adopt the one mode of thinking that, to humans, justifies any obvious atrocity: “doing the right thing”, “righting a wrong”, “fighting the good fight”, “being a hero”.

And we LOVE those situations. Shows like 24 are all about getting us high on “hard choices”, where we are invited to be monstrous and indulge all of our cruelty, but it’s really “good”, and instead of being bullies, we feel like heroes for doing the horrible thing our monstrous little ids wanted us to do anyway.

Think about the entirety of the SJW trip and methodology, consider both sides of GamerGate doxxing and swatting each other, etc…both are firmly convinced they are the victims and that their own victimizing actions are therefore justified. And people are getting high off of it…the joy of “justified” cruelty and battle is what has driven much of the culture of the online world, and the only thing that can explain that is that people get off on it. Even without governments, we’ll “go to war” at the drop of a hat…just convince us that someone kicked a puppy, and we will cook a million puppies alive to “right the wrong”.

We are invited to ignore every normal ethical boundary we observe the minute the injustice-signal is sent up. As long as we can convince ourselves that we’ve–or the object of our “support”–has been “hard done by”, ANYTHING, up to and include massive wars and the murder and torture of innocents, can and has been justifiable to most people’s minds.

Right now, ISIS/ISIL are using the inujustice-hack to gain support all over the Middle East, as did their forebears, while the US government and that of ally nations post-9/11 did the exact same thing, using the injustice-hack to get most of the country–and several other countries–to finally sign off on things they had wanted to do anyway for decades. Neither side are good, and in fact have committed most of the injustices in the situations they have been involved in…but goddamn, that injustice-hack just seems to make it all go away, doesn’t it? All those facts just disappear in the warm glow of feeling like a hero.

IRL, almost nothing is ever so simple. Almost no situations that ever exist have heroes and villains, victims and victimizers. Most stuff is just people doing their own things, and most of that consists of behaviors that are orthogonal to the entire paradigm of victims, heroes, and villains. Worldviews–and they are many–that attempt to break down all of history and human life to exploitation, war, and struggle are being disingenuous in an effort to use the injustice-hack for themselves.

It will win few friends and lose many to refuse the tribalism implicit in adopting one victim group or another, but if we are interested in stopping the damage caused by these sorts of conflicts, we must forgo the natural highs of responding to an injustice with more injustice. We must maintain that the same ethics apply to defense as offense, because as long as we let them differ in practice, we will just keep up the constant wars, cultural and physical, until that really is all we do…commit new injustices as get-backs for old injustices.

Disclosure: As you might guess from the last name, J. David Spurlock is my uncle. While I love him dearly, we try to maintain a family value of honesty and we all share a respect for literature and art, so read this review with no worries: I’m being honest, honest!

She was something special, something different. In the early days of Weird Tales magazine, the art featured was often lush, lurid, and deliciously effective, and none more so than that of Margaret Brundage. In an era when women were often forced into restrictive social roles, she defied expectations on multiple levels.

Her work was frankly sexual and sensational, with most covers featuring deep colors and sharply outlined figures of naked–or mostly naked–women, usually in danger and–perhaps counter-intuitively–posing sexily while coping with that danger.

Weird Tales, May 1934; Cover by Margaret Brundage.

Sometimes there were also scantily-clad men, though it was sometimes unclear who was supposed to be protecting whom.

My favorite section, “The Secret Life of Margaret Brundage”, gives us a snapshot of early 20th Century politics and what it was like for Margaret and her husband, Slim (who shared her political and social interests). Here you can find details on their involvement with labor activism and the Wobblies (The Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW), the Chicago activist scene, the Free Speech movement, and the civil rights movement. Some of the issues and views detailed show that while, in many ways, the issues remain the same, the movements themselves have changed a great deal, with the IWW all but extinct and the labor movement demonized by many.

While I don’t want to recount too many details (yes, even historical books can have spoilers!), I do want to say that as an author who owes a great deal to Weird Tales AND as a person who has spent a good part of his own life devoted to progressive and labor activism, the book taught me a lot, as well as collecting some truly beautiful and historically important works of art.

PORTLAND, OR. October 25rd, 2013 – Dark Regions Press, a specialty publisher in business since 1985 has launched a new Kickstarter campaign supporting a new book project by Joe R. Lansdale, award-winning author of Edge of Dark Water, The Thicket, The Bottoms, Bubba Ho-Tep, the Hap and Leonard series, Incident On and Off a Mountain Road and many other novels, short stories, comic books and screenplays. The book will be lavishly illustrated by Santiago Caruso, a renowned surrealist artist of the macabre and fantastique from Argentina.

The new Joe Lansdale novella is slated to be Book II in the Black Labyrinth imprint published by Dark Regions Press.

Black Labyrinth is an imprint of ten original psychological horror novels and novellas from the living masters of horror and dark fiction all illustrated by surrealist artist Santiago Caruso. The first book in the imprint, The Walls of the Castle by Tom Piccirilli has been met with wide critical acclaim, and the hardcovers are considered some of the finest that Dark Regions Press has produced.

The Kickstarter campaign for Black Labyrinth Book II: Joe R. Lansdale began on Tuesday, October 8th and will run until Sunday, November 10th. As of Friday, October 25th the campaign has reached 54% of its funding goal. The campaign can be found by searching “Black Labyrinth” on Kickstarter.com or by visiting the campaign page directly at: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chrismorey/black-labyrinth-book-ii-joe-r-lansdale

Join Dark Regions Press in bringing a new novella by one of the most well-respected authors of horror and dark fiction in the world: Joe R. Lansdale. Accompanied by the fantastic artwork of surrealist artist Santiago Caruso, this is going to be a very special book that readers of Joe Lansdale and art lovers will celebrate.

So hit the link in the press release above, the banner below, or the image in the sidebar over to the right and give what you can…it would be a damnable shame to miss out on something like this.

This morning, I ran across this little listing in a writer’s group I belong to on Facebook:

OMNIDAWN is currently reading for the BEST AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL WRITING anthology (“BAX”). DEADLINE: November 15, 2013. READING FEE: “$9 for three pieces of writing or nine pages (whichever is fewer).”

This enraged me so much, I simply have to call BS. What’s the reading fee for, if not to pay for overhead, which includes paying the actual talent…you know, the writers?

I swear, there is a whole strata of publishers–and I don’t mean the big kids, they have their problems, but at least they understand they need to pay for the product they want to sell–that seem to think THEY are the important part of the industry. To these I have a message:

We DON’T need YOU. Not anymore, and to a degree we never did, we just got slowly conditioned to believe that US making YOU money while you scammed and screwed us was YOU doing US a favor. But that’s changing, and more and more of us are realizing WE DON’T NEED YOU.

And to my fellow actual creators:

STOP subbing to these markets. Exposure does not pay bills and costs the person making money off of our work NOTHING. If a market says they are a “for the love” market, those people don’t know what love is. Love is not exploitation. These publishers are making money on these publications, and asking us to do the most important work for free. THIS IS THEFT. THIS IS EXPLOITATION. STOP going along with it. Accept nothing less than at least a token payment or hard author’s copy (no ebooks), and do that ONLY for small markets who feasibly can’t afford pro rates. Be reasonable, sure…but don’t accept the lie that you need to let yourself be exploited in order to be a “real” writer.

If you’re just starting out, self-publish or post work on your own blog, with your own advertising and/or tipping/donation setup to make SOMETHING off of it and get “exposure” as well. REAL publishers and editors care about the quality of the work, and are looking for good writers, not writers who convinced someone else to put up a story on someone else’s website, or that someone other than yourself put it out on iTunes and Amazon. Please understand: in a world where one person can pretend to run any amount of ezines or electronic publishing houses with little cost to them, it doesn’t matter if you’re the one putting it out there to someone who actually CARES about finding new, good writers. It could always just be the same person, trying their own scam, so all that can matter is the WRITING.

Ignore those who say “any credit is a good credit when starting out”. That made sense in the print days, when you knew that if someone got published anywhere that meant real money was spent. Then the technology changed, and xeroxed/mimeographed zines undermined that basic premise. And from Charles Bukowski to Thomas Ligotti, without that new, even smaller press created by cheap printing/copying, some amazing writers would never have gotten their start. The “gatekeepers”, granted their status by virtue of their operating capital, wouldn’t have LET us read them.

Now, even better technology has made it FREE to “publish” a book or story. The “publishers” of digital markets have very little (if any) overhead, which means your “for the exposure/love” hard work is pure profit for them. From Huffington Post to some random ezine, if you’re writing/creating for free, you’re getting screwed.

This is why so many tiny publishers and online magazines have popped up into existence, perfectly willing to use the underlying emotional belief that someone “giving us a job” is somehow doing us a favor, rather than making money off of US and therefore needing to pay their bill for services rendered. It’s almost free to “start a magazine” or “electronic publishing house”, and just like the exploitative corporations and bosses who purposely created this implication, these publishers are using us and wanting us to be grateful for the privilege of making them money. THIS IS WRONG. They are not only NOT doing you any favors, they are willfully exploiting you on all levels…emotionally/mentally, physically/temporally, and financially. Some will even go so low as to attack your status as a “true artist” for daring to even mention or expect payment…and they will then laugh all the way to the bank.

And since they aren’t paying you, you also have nothing to lose by saying “no” and submitting with someone who takes the work seriously. No credit with anyone who won’t pay for your work is worth having. The more writers and creators who realize this, who realize that “content”, aka stories and narratives in all media, is the only American industry left, the better for ALL of us. Whether it’s movies, books, video games, or hypertextual interactive media experiences, THEY NEED US. They can’t do what we do. They can’t even figure out what will “work” or be a “hit” versus a “flop”; that’s why they are so obsessed with remakes, franchises, and remixes, because all their bean-counting brains can parse is “what made money last time”. We NEED to start exploiting this powerful position. Nothing the modern economy creates makes real money anymore except entertainment, and the various publishers, producers, and corporations can’t produce that without US.

So stop acting like they are doing you a favor by condescending to make money off of your hard work. They aren’t. The last barriers to entry are slipping away; if you want to write, it makes increasing sense to self-publish. If you want to make movies, it makes increasing sense to stay indie and avoid the Hollywood “system”. The same is true of games, interactive stories, etc. Look at the indie scenes in any field and you find the exciting, interesting, good work. Sure, there are stinkers in there, too; but there is also a greater possibility of unique visions and original creative work, and thus greater art.

This, of course, scares the crap out of industries that have made a fortune from exploiting barriers to entry; not only did they have the cash, they controlled the industries through “gatekeepers”, so nothing they didn’t want to let through got out to the general public. The public and the creators have NEVER benefited by having such “gatekeepers”; all that has happened is the creators were forced to create crap or starve and the public never even got a chance to decide what was “good” or “bad” on their own.

And this applies to everything; musicians need to stop trying to “get a record deal”. You can do just as well with a good DAW and your own abilities as with any record company. You may need to spend a little money on equipment and instruments, and have to master some new skills, but that’s always been a part of music. What you don’t NEED to do is let those who want nothing more than to exploit your talent and inspiration run your world for you, making YOUR money and then leaving you high and dry when you’re not the hot property anymore.

In short (too late!): respect yourself and your work. Our allegiance is to ourselves and our art, and it is an insult to your very own SOUL to allow that self and art to be abused and exploited. We all deserve better, and the sooner ALL of us realize this, the sooner we will GET what we deserve. I’m not saying unionize (though that WOULD be a great idea); I’m just saying respecting yourselves and your work will go far beyond just yourself.